sastyk | November 29, 2010It has been just about a year since I made my transition to Science Blogs, and other than the kerfuffle in July and the fact that they still don't pay us particularly often, in general, I think this has been a successful move for me - particularly in my larger goal, which was to reach a readership that wouldn't get this material otherwise. Science Blogs also drove me to write some good stuff, in response to critique or query or new readers - and that's important to me. So a quick year in review - I thought for those who hadn't seen them, I'd go back and pick my own favorite piece from each…
sastyk | November 29, 2010Two updates for the Post-Apocalyptic Novel Reading Club. First, I realized that I have scheduled two things for the first of the upcoming month - my "Anyway Project" updates and the first discussion of _The Witch of Hebron_. This is far more than I am likely to accomplish, so I've decided my PANRC will start on the 7th - so you all have an extra reading week. In both cases, the dates are slightly fungible given that your blogiste is a bit of a slacker - if they fall on a Shabbos, holiday or something else important, it will simply be the nearest possible date. But for this month, Anyway…
sastyk | November 23, 2010I hope my readers will forgive me today for lapsing back into my prior profession rather than my present one as an energy and environmental writer. You see, before I gained fame and fortune writing about our ecological situation, I was a mild-mannered college teacher, whose favorite and most important job was teaching rhetoric to undergraduates.
I am perhaps odd in observing that I thought that teaching writing was the most important thing I did. Most academics believe their primary subject matter is the central portion of their work, but I came to see that the place that I had the greatest…
sastyk | November 23, 2010If you want to make a traditional Thanksgiving dinner wholly from scratch, you start ahead of time. If you want to make it from food you've raised yourself, you start way, way ahead of time - like in January of the year before. In some ways, it starts even earlier, but January is the new year - and when you grow your own, you are always thinking of the future - even if not consciously about any particular dinner.
It is in January that we order seeds for the vegetables we'd serve at Thanksgiving, that we debate which varieties of pumpkin and carrots, celery root, sweet corn, squash and leeks…
sastyk | November 23, 2010The always-brillliant and funny Christine Patton aka The Peak Oil Hausfrau, in the latest Peak Oil Review Commentary, has turned her sights to the IEA's recent predictions, managing to properly skewer both the IEA's predictions and the predictive value of economic modelling (two great tastes that taste great together!):
The International Economics Agency today released its World Income Outlook, which predicts a 564 percent increase in the median world income over the next three months. IEA Chief Economics Officer Brandon Blighted explains, "Our meticulous research clearly shows that an…
sastyk | November 22, 2010I was about to write something about the FAO's recent warning about the food situation, but it turns out I don't have to, since Liz Borkowski at the Pump Handle beat me to it - great link to Raj Patel's piece in the Guardian as well. Definitely worth a read!
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has released a new Food Outlook, and the news isn't great.
Global wheat and rice production have both suffered setbacks this year as Russia has suffered from drought and Pakistan from floods. Poor cassava harvests in Asia are also a concern, given that cassava is the staple food of nearly a…
sastyk | November 22, 2010The centerpiece of any homegrown Thanksgiving meal, assuming you are not a vegetarian, is inevitably the homegrown turkey. And there are a lot of good reasons to get a local turkey or raise your own - there's the flavor which is richer and deeper, an essence of turkey thing, there's the fact that you know what went into it. And there's the fact that by raising older breeds of turkeys, you actually preserve their future by eating them - honestly, there is no retirement home for elderly turkeys, and no one keeps them as pets. The future of the Blue Slate and the Standard Bronze depends…
sastyk | November 19, 2010In yesterday's NY Times Op-ed, Kristof apologized for comparing US income inequity to that of "Banana Republics" - that is, for insulting other nations by comparing them to the US, which has now achieved wholly unprecedented levels of economic injustice.
My point was that the wealthiest plutocrats now actually control a greater share of the pie in the United States than in historically unstable countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. But readers protested that this was glib and unfair, and after reviewing the evidence I regretfully confess that they have a point.
That's right: I may…
sastyk | November 16, 2010PANRC, by the way, is the acronym for "Post-Apocalyptic Novel Reading Club" pronounced by those in the know (ie, the person who just made this up 3 seconds ago) as "Panric" ;-). And while December's selection (we'll start on 12/1), Jim Kunstler's _The Witch of Hebron_ has been out for a bit, Kurt Cobb's _Prelude_ (which is, in fact, an immediately pre-apocalyptic novel) is now out. YAY!!!!
I've read _Prelude_ and besides the fact that I think it is fun and readable - a peak oil novel someone might actually read for fun - I think what Cobb is doing is important and I want to support it.…
sastyk | November 15, 2010This will be a quiet week - I've got my Dad making his annual visit, a talk, a short trip, and then a slew of guests arriving for the weekend for Simon's 9th birthday party and Simon's first Torah reading (he's too young to read in the main synagogue, but he'll be the youngest kid ever to chant Torah at our shul in Junior Congregation), and there's a lot of cooking, plus the getting-ready-for-winter stuff is in high gear. So don't expect too much of me ;-).
The single FAQ about me is "how do you do it all?" The standard answer I have given since the question started to occur is still true…
sastyk | November 10, 2010Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon. Working class people (who strangely, the paper and the author rarely seem to care about otherwise) can't afford an organic chicken or a gallon of organic milk! Ordinary people don't have time to make soup. Regular folk don't care about that stuff - that's for brie-sniffing folks, just the next rich people's food fad.
I can think of a few hundred refutations of this claim, of course. There are all of my…
sastyk | November 9, 2010
Variations on the obligation to love one's neighbor show up across both the religious and secular spectrum. They tend to provoke a range of responses - from those who attempt to sort out what loving people who are not part of your immediate tribe would mean, to those who reject the necessity. This is not an easy idea - and even if you can sort out what it means to love people who you may not know well, or like much, or even trust, or know how to get to knowing, liking and trusting - it is a damned hard thing to put into practice. I want to talk a bit more about why even use the word love,…
sastyk | November 9, 2010First of all, in response to reader suggestion, I've changed the names of the categories. People rightly felt "domestic economy" and "household economy" were too confusing, and reader Apple Jack Creek suggested we change "domestic economy" to "domestic infrastructure." Claire also suggested that "Farm and Subsistence" was too specific to my case, and that we should just go to "Subsistence" there. I don't think I quite agree, although I am taking the word "farm" out since not everyone has one, and replacing it with "cottage industry." Not everyone will have a cottage economy emerge from…
sastyk | November 8, 2010The oft-discussed 10,000 mile Caesar Salad, used to illustrate the degree to which our food system is drenched in fossil fuels, really is only a piker when it comes to the spaces that food can make you cover.
10K miles by airplane, refrigerator truck, etc... is nothing compared to the distances in time and place you can cover in seconds with food - consider, for example the space in time and distance a single evocative bite can offer you. Home you are transported to your mother's table in Detroit from your home in Lyon with a single bite. Back you travel, 20 years and 5,000 miles to the…
sastyk | November 4, 2010
I have a vivid memory as a teenager of yelling at my Mother, "I didn't ask for two mothers! I don't need two mothers! I don't even want *you* and you got me this other one who won't leave me alone!" I was 14 and about as revolting as every other fourteen year old, or maybe just a little more. And like most step-children, I resented the heck out of my step-Mom, Susie. I have to say, I'm awed by anyone who sticks with it through the outs and ins of step-parenting - you've got my admiration - just thinking back on how unrewarding it was for my step-mother makes me realize y'all who take on…
sastyk | November 4, 2010Note: A cold, wet day in November seems like as good a day as any to talk about owning a wood cookstove, re-running a piece I first wrote in 2007. When people come to my house, they are often a little disappointed to see that it looks pretty much like other houses. But the wood cookstove really is different than what most people know - even folks who heat with wood usually don't cook with it as well. And while heating and cooking with wood aren't appropriate in every environment, it is appropriate to mine, and maybe to more people than have given it thought before. I also know it is one…
sastyk | November 3, 2010The election is over and the results are depressing, much as expected - it was not a good night for anyone who believes that the most important work of government in hard times will be protecting ordinary people. This is a stretch to imagine at the best of times, and this was not them.
There's a larger question, however, that emerges out of the ashes of our usual political self-incineration - what will ordinary people will do with their fear now that the election is over?
Over the last few weeks, a series of articles have emerged that observe that the language of voter anger, so ubiquitous…
sastyk | November 2, 2010The Peak Oil Hausfrau revealed that the news about the climate isn't all bad: it is good for the minions of hell:
However, legal experts say that Hell's colonization of land owned by various Satanic holding companies is all perfectly legal. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, an avid property-rights advocate, observed, "Some people say that Demons belong in Hell. I tend to agree, but Satan has purchased this real estate through legitimate and proper channels. What would happen if we tried to just nullify all the contracts that we didn't like? Chaos, that's what!"
Several sources in…
sastyk | November 2, 2010Stuart Staniford is turning his customary care and attention to recent climate change drought projections, and the results are frightening, but also critically important. There's a summary of his posts on this subject here - read them all.
Sharon
sastyk | November 1, 2010It hasn't escaped my notice that today is November 1, and I'm supposed to be starting the Whole-Life Redesign Project. In fact, I am starting it - I'm taking the opportunity created by my kids being out of the house to move all the food storage around and clean under things and get rid of things (hmmm...should there still be baby cereal in the back of my food storage, given that the baby turned 5 on Friday...ummm....) and otherwise make a giant mess in my house in the general hope of making it better afterwards.
What I haven't done is sit down and write out the parameters of how this project…